Older Moscow: One can’t help but love these old sections of this great city. This building is not far around the corner from the Mendeleyev Journal and the bottom floor is occupied with things like shops and post offices and here on this corner of an apartment house is a market.
Here is a guide to the signs: продукты = products, a common term for small grocery market. мясо = meat and the further explanation of куры = chickens and рыба = fish. Russians don’t each as much beef as Westerners and fish and chicken are perhaps the most consumed meats followed by pork, lamb and goat.
рыба, is fish, pronounced sort of like “Reba” and one of the first Russian words this writer learned at in an early college language class in Arizona. It was classic word association as wast to instantly put “fish” (Reba) together with Reba McIntire whose music might strike some ears as a little “fishy” and hence the term stuck. LOL
This market is open and the apartments in the floors above still in use. These older apartments are normally more roomy than newer but more compact flats.
